The Taking

33

WAGLESS, ALL BUSINESS, AND AS QUICK AS THE FOG allowed, Virgil led them to a residence on La Cresta Avenue, which was neither near the crest of the mountain nor an avenue, but halfway between the lake and the ridge line, a two-lane street not appreciably different from all the others in town.

The single-story house, in the Craftsman style, looked cozy and welcoming, in spite of the fact that the fierce rain had stripped all the leaves from the trumpet vines that climbed its trellises and had battered beds of cyclamens into red-and purple-petaled ruin.

As they approached the front porch along handsome flagstones, Neil suddenly stepped off the walkway, squished three steps across the soggy lawn, and said, "Look at this."

The object of his interest was a stone pine, and not the tree itself so much as what clustered on its fissured bark. Squinting in the bruised light, Molly saw patches of a blackish thallus, flecked with green, growing on the trunk in crustlike forms.

She'd seen lichen similar to this, although no earthly lichen featured luminous elements to equal these. Every emerald-green fleck was softly radiant; the glow pulsed in what she suspected might be a sympathetic rhythm that matched the long, slow throbs of the engines powering the airborne leviathan that had only recently passed over them.

Along the perimeter of every thallus, the aggressive lichen grew at a visible rate, outward in all directions, as if she were watching time-lapse photography. During the minute that she and Neil studied it, the crust advanced almost half an inch.

At this rate, the trunk and every branch would be covered in this scaly scab in only a few hours.

Lichen were themselves complex symbiotic organisms composed of a fungus in union with an alga. They frequently thrived without damage to the host tree.

In this instance, Molly suspected that the stone pine would not survive the encrustation. Either it would perish and fall, hollowed out by a species of rot as alien as the organism colonizing its bark, or it would be invaded, mutated, and remade into the genetic image of a plant from another world.

The radiant emerald pulse that stippled the blackish thallus had a jewel-bright gleam. In different circumstances, the tree might have appeared to be inlaid with a wealth of precious gems, glittering and magical.

No aura of fairyland wonder surrounded the pine, however. Quite the opposite: In spite of its bejeweled aspect, and though the lichen infestation had only recently begun, the tree appeared cancer-ridden, mottled with malignancies.

Virgil had not approached the pine, but had remained on the flagstone walkway, watchful and tense.

Molly shared the dog's wariness. She didn't touch the lichen, fearing that it might transfer to her fingertip and prove able to colonize human skin as readily as it did tree bark.

On the other side of the walkway stood a matching pine, and from a distance, even in this half-light, she could see the luminous lichen thriving on that specimen.

Virgil led them up the porch steps to the front door.

No candles, oil lamps, or other emergency lighting shone inside. The windows were dark except for dim reflections of the purple glow that suffused the lazily stirring mist.

If they entered without knocking, they were inviting gunfire.

On the other hand, if children inside were already in any kind of danger-from Michael Render or from something even less human-Molly and Neil might raise the level of jeopardy by announcing themselves.

Their dilemma was resolved, in part, when the front-door lock clicked and disengaged.

Reflexively, they stepped back and to the side, making less obvious targets of themselves.

Virgil stood his ground.

The door opened in a swift, inward sweep. Although only the influx of fog-filtered morning sunshine illuminated the small foyer, visibility was sufficient for Molly to discern that the space was deserted, as though they were being welcomed by a ghost.

The hallway beyond the foyer remained as dark as a snake hole.

To leave both of Neil's hands free for the shotgun, Molly produced her flashlight.

Stout-hearted, Virgil boldly entered in advance of the light.

From the porch, with the flash, Molly probed past the foyer. A narrow hall table, two vases atop it. A door at the far end. She saw no immediate threat.

Although all of the dogs had exhibited extraordinary behavior this night, though Virgil in particular had astonished with the rose and with his apparent understanding of Molly's mission, entering a stranger's house, uninvited and unannounced, required nerve and full trust in the animal's reliability. For a moment, she couldn't summon either, and Neil hesitated, too.

In response to their reluctance, Virgil turned his head and regarded them with a golden gaze. To Molly, this seemed not to be the usual eye-shine of animals in the dark, but a phenomenon unique to this night, not simple light refraction, not bioluminescence, but something of a wondrous character: nimbuses pooled in sockets, signifying sanctification.

Almost as if enchanted, spell-struck and spell-caught, by the dog's golden stare, Molly shed her reservations. Her mouth was dry with doubt, but she worked up spit, and spat. She stepped across the threshold, entered the house.

Neil followed her, and when they both stood in the foyer, the front door closed behind them with a softness more disturbing than a slam. No draft had pulled it shut.

Fear abided with Molly, and fed on itself, and grew, but she did not turn back to wrench open the door. She knew that it wanted her to flee-whatever it might be. If she retreated, she would choose the moment of retreat and would not allow it to be chosen for her.

Virgil sniffed at closed doors and open archways to the left and right of the central hall.

The dog had no suspicion of the foyer closet. Molly opened that door anyway, and Neil probed the hanging coats with the barrel of the shotgun.

Although Virgil showed no interest in the study, where the drapes were drawn and the blackness was absolute, Molly scanned that chamber with the flashlight. Shadows stretched and flexed, but they were merely the shadows of furniture, granted movement by the moving beam.

At the living-room archway, the shepherd made a thin sound of canine anxiety.

Amethystine light, from the dusky morning, pressed against the mullioned windows, revealing nothing, but Molly knew what troubled the dog, for she heard it, too: a whispery sound, a rustle and susurration.

The flashlight winked and flared off the glass in picture frames. Off ceramic lamps. Off a vase, a cut-crystal bowl, a mirror above the fireplace. Off a dead TV screen.

With the 12-gauge, Neil followed the beam, but he found nothing to shoot.

The rustling grew louder and seemed to come from all sides.

Ears pricked, tail lowered, the dog turned in a circle.

"The walls," Neil said, and with the flashlight, Molly found him with one ear to the plaster.

She and Neil flanked the archway, and she moved to the wall on her side of that opening. She leaned close, closer.

To a more analytic ear, the sound was not a rustle, exactly, but a fluttering, thrumming, as if a flock of birds or a horde of flying insects were frenziedly beating wings against the back side of the lath and plaster.